Toshiba Portégé R500-10U Ultra-Portable Notebook Review

I purchased this laptop with 2G memory and 160G hard drive. I have been hugely disappointed, it take more than 5 mins to boot, it does not shut down (I leave the battery to run down), gets very hot and there is virtually no battery life (40 mins is about it). Subjectively it is very flimsy and the screen is really poor (especially viewing angle) and as far as viewing outside with the backlighting off - it is a joke - its sort of all over grey without contrast. The screen seems especially flimsy but that is where the Kensington lock is located and that is a disaster waiting to happen by ripping the screen off I have re-installed Vista several time with no change and it will not recover to XP even though a disk is provided. Vista installation is very irritating with allsorts of nag messages the bloat-ware is ridiculous when I first got it seems the OS was using 50 GB. It is actually unusable because it is so slow and I get memory resource problems all the time - can have only one or two application open at the same time before it crashes. I would avoid this laptop at all costs - it may be light but my Asus PC eee 701 is a better PC in every respect (much much faster and more solidly built).

I like the reviews on this site and other reviewed products match my experience, but in this case it is as if its an entirely different product.